Now in Alpha: Fast, Free and Unlimited Personal Media Sharing Powered by BitTorrent

Now in Alpha: Fast, Free and Unlimited Personal Media Sharing Powered by BitTorrent

Have you ever been stuck trying to send an HD home movie to a friend over the Internet? Or a batch of high-resolution photos? How about longer smartphone videos?

It’s not easy. You can try a complicated FTP service. Or pay big fees for a file sharing or cloud service. Or dramatically reduce the size, quality or length of your creation to send via email or social networks.

Today, we are very excited to preview an entirely new alpha software client – built from the ground up by the same engineers who develop BitTorrent and µTorrent. It’s fast, free, and totally unlimited. No limits on the file size or the number of files, or even the number of recipients. No hidden fees. Just you, your friends, and your media.

It doesn’t yet have a name (during the alpha, we’re calling it “Share”), and it is available for immediate download here.

Share’s power, speed and “unlimited” philosophy are possible thanks to the ultra-efficient BitTorrent protocol. Instead of requiring users to store files in remote data centers, Share users seed files from their own computer and recipients may download them directly. Once downloaded, a recipient also seeds a file. If multiple members of a group actively seed files, download speeds are dramatically increased thanks to the distributed nature of the sharing protocol. To ensure quality of service and file availability, we will also initially host and remotely seed a file for a limited time.

Features:

No Limits: With no limits on number of sends, file size/quality, or number of recipients, users may send HD videos, high-res photo collections, and other oversized files – with no fees.

Ultra Fast Downloads: Share is built on top of an innovative file-sharing technology that is already used by over 100 million people every month. Friends may now download the biggest files without the endless wait.

Private: Choose exactly who may access shared files. Set up groups to share with friends, family and co-workers, or just send a file to one person.

Social and Fun: Friends may comment on the files in real-time. Share is interactive, conversational and social.

“Share is the culmination of over a year’s research into personal media sharing. We have always known that BitTorrent is one of the fastest ways to send or receive a large file. With today’s consumer cameras/video recorders producing stunning quality, traditional media sharing requires concessions,” said Shahi Ghanem, our chief strategist. “With Share, you don’t have to crop photos, reduce resolutions or cut video length to easily share something with your friends, family and colleagues. It’s much faster than traditional ‘cloud’ solutions and easy for anyone.”

Share can trace its origins back to the BitTorrent Mainline ‘Project Chrysalis’ experimental software released last May. Continued Ghanem, “We believed personal media sharing would be an ideal extension to our existing µTorrent and BitTorrent software. After evaluating the user response and feedback, we realized we had the right goal, but users identified challenges with the implementation. Ultimately, we took what we learned and started again from scratch. Share was born.”

Share will also be integrated into all BitTorrent and µTorrent software clients following alpha testing.

Will you check it out and let us know what you think? We really value community feedback for all of our software clients, and we hope that you all will give us a hand and help us build the best personal media sharing service ever.

How is privacy ensured? Are the files encrypted before sharing? Could someone listening to network traffic gain access to some or all of shared file?

Aaron

I don’t want to be stuck seeding stuff. I can upload to Dropbox or whatever and the files are there forever for others to download or me to access from different computers. How long do you seed things as well?

http://port6969.wordpress.com BitTorrent

Hi Aaron – we don’t yet know how long we’ll seed the file…it’s one of the things we’ll learn from the alpha based on creating a good user experience.

Right now, the product is geared toward sharing a file with a few friends, not long-term storage per se. However, as long as the file is still on your computer and in the group you’ve created, it’ll seed if one of your friends wants to download it.

Thanks for the feedback – these are exactly the kind of questions we need at this stage of testing.

But, would it be possible to make a group and share an entire folder, and it’s changes.

I can do this today via Apple ID and Lion but it is extremely slow compared to this.

Most of us have a computer at work, one at home and so on. Having to syncronize these folders via Ms Live Mesh or Dropbox is just a pain in the ass (Mesh works OK, but it is slow and isn’t always reliable)

http://p2pzon.com p2pzon

I always like the hybrid idea of joing peer-to-peer technology with cloud. Users might worry about seeding or privacy issue too just because it is power back-end by BitTorrent. I wish BitTorrent can release technical article or paper on how you guys design personal media sharing from the ground. I will definitely give it a try now.

Alonso

Hi, i’m trying to download the App but just download the uTorrent client, I got a Mac, it could be that?

So, I tried to share some pictures with my brother. On my side it looked like he was downloading and said 30% but he said it was at 0% on his side. I’m not a computer novice but I am new to this torrent thing. Are we doing something wrong? This is a great way to share our files, if it works!

Eric

After install Share,i use it one time with pleasure. After that thirst time i only see a light grey page with on the rightside the feedbackthing. The rest i didn’t see again? Any idea what is the solution for this problem?

Valeryan_24

Hello,

This program is very interesting, since Wuala stopped the P2P sharing feature.

Cloud storage based on private computers, so no more need to pay for very high amount of Go backups, very easy direct big files sending etc…

Just a question : will you provide a version for Linux, too ?

Dilemma

What are the firewall ports involed?

Dieter

Is there a linux client planned and/or is it going to be open source?

Sounds great btw

Lorenzo

Interesting, but:

Is required to configure port forwarding on home router?
It will work behind firewall/nat/proxy/company network ?

I saw this featured on Hak5 and immediately downloaded it; I’m wondering now, is the Android app for filming video and sharing it also available? How does one get that?

John

Hi there!
Very nice idea.
Looking forward to see how it will integrate with the standard torrentclient.
I have a couple of suggestions:
(i) the feedbackpage is lacking the textarea “suggestions on improvment”
(ii)the nice little popups taking you through the interface, you cannot close them until you fullfill them(currently I am stuck at inive group members)
(iii) there should be a defaultgroup for “just you” so that you can use this specific group for syncronising
(iv) a little more background on how files are stored and distributed, how can I make sure/is it ensured that my stuff is not viewed by an unauthorised 3rd party and/or linked to me.Issues regarding privacy in general(e.g. where is my accountinformation stored), big deal especially nowadays and some torrentusers in general ;)(maybe in form of a handout available in the clients group already, i don’tknow)
(v)regaring (iv) the integration of FB sucks.
BIIIG datamining factory.I understand the movebehind this and it is really a smart one,BUT like the FB-likebuttons, are they recording even though you don’t click them?
I would prefere an openFormat like Step2 with OpenID or so,interfacing with a service of your choice that way you can choos, which SocialNetwork you wanna use(maybe multiple) if one at all.
(vi) regarding the technerds among us, will there be technical documentation or at least some paper talking about the technical functionality, because you guys tackeled some major problems with share.

So I see that it is not a direct transfer from peer to peer. If it is only one peer to one peer, it first is uploaded to amazon storage?

http://hi doreen

i want to downloud free u dorren

http://hi doreen

how can i downloud u dorren to master my cd please

alex

can you get some facebook page and post some forum threads for more people to discuss and devs to report?

Antonio

My suggestion is to implement SUBGROUPS. That is, I could create a group called John and various subgroups within it (photos, documents, videos, etc.) Another idea is the ability to customize the integration with a host (like dropbox).

Antonio

Another important implementation is the possibility of moving files between the groups (folders) without having to upload again.

drosan

hi,
i want to use the latest sharing option for my anroid device. mean i shot a picture or movie and will send this over bittorrent share from my phone to my computer.

so i have utorrent 3.1.3 with remote runnin on my pc and have the utorrent remoteapp on my android device. for example if i choose an picture on my andro device and go to the sharebutton there is no option to share it over bittorentshare! what else i need?